Updates and feedback roundup

It's time for some meta discussion: feedback! I read everything which
comes in via the
"contact"
links you'll find at the bottom of every post. I've picked up a good
number of tips from readers. I really appreciate all of those, plus
the words of support I receive. So let's talk about updates to recent
posts.

Regarding
hiring,
I heard some real horror stories about other "second system" projects
out there. One project had thrown six developers at the problem and
was now pushing six months late. It looks like they're trying to cram
everything into one project and have been throwing people at the
problem. Not good.

On my
half-baked ## search idea,
Pascal wrote in with a note about
W3C's "XPointer"
working draft. It's intended to allow selecting things in XML
documents. Naturally, it would need to be implemented in a browser to
even start becoming useful, but it would be a start.

My only complaint is that a sample text-search would look ridiculous and
would be unwieldy for humans. Even if that whole recommendation ends up
taking root at some point, I would still call for having ## as an
additional shortcut to a simple "find in document" lookup.

My site's look and feel was mentioned a few places. One comment on
Hacker News called it "a unit test", and I assume that's meant to cast a
negative light on things. I'm not a graphical designer and never have
been, so what you see reflects a certain pragmatic "good enough" ethos
combined with a wee bit of flair in a few places. Another comment said
that it looked particularly good when zoomed on a mobile device, so
maybe they cancel out.

As for my
bridge picture,
it might be a cliche, but it's a particularly beautiful one. The fact
that I took it myself and don't owe anyone royalties on it makes
everything that much sweeter. Anyone can park up there in the
Marin Headlands
to get a similar shot when the weather cooperates.

I received a suggestion to put up some way to accept payments through a
specific web site (flattr). While I'm not sure I want to sign up for
that right now, I will mention that I am already set up to accept credit
cards as a side-effect of building my
scanner
and
fred projects.

In response, I've put up a
support page
which will allow anyone with a PayPal account or an accepted
credit/debit card to send a virtual tip if they so desire.

I heard from some Googlers and Xooglers (ex-Googlers, get it?) about the
foodsituation.
There was a report of a "mad rush to the cafeteria" in the evening,
followed by people carting food home on the employee shuttles. They
implied that the loyalty to the company just wasn't there.

As someone who used to work relatively late hours at times and had
dinner at work now and then, I can definitely relate to some of this. I
have my own personal moral standards which basically meant that I would
not go to grab dinner unless I had already or was planning to put in at
least X hours of actual work that day. Usually that meant "go get a
burrito at Andale, then work some more, then go home". What I
specifically avoided was snagging food, eating it, and then immediately
disappearing for the day. Some people gave those folks a name:
"eater-leaver".

It was telling that I got far more done in the evenings after most
people had disappeared for the day. I could close the door to my office
(which was shared with 3 other people), unplug my headphones from my
laptop, and let my music play at a reasonable volume. During the day,
that would be impossible, since it would annoy other people.

Consider this little anecdote about office space another plug for
Peopleware,
I guess.

Ticket management
and choosing which task to do first turns out to be something from
Operational Research theory according to a tip from Suraj. Another
name for it is
shortest job next.
Wikipedia seems to be talking about it in a operating system context,
but it might apply to anything which uses scheduling models.

Okay, that's it for this meta wrap-up. Back to our regularly scheduled
programming.